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Thursday, January 11, 2007

On special people, Big Brother and Bollywood feuds

Heavy travel means light blogging: I flew from Mumbai to Delhi yesterday, and took a train to Chandigarh in the evening, where I shall remain until Saturday morning. I spend all of Saturday in Delhi before flying back, a little bit of winter hopefully packed in my bags. Connectivity is awful here, and blogging shall have to be light. As I have no time for long posts, let me leave you with a few interesting links.

First up, Laveesh Bhandari writes in the Indian Express about how migrants in India have such a tough time, pointing to "the recent killings in Assam and Noida" as an illustration of that. One-third of urban Indians are migrants, and I hope the number increases. Migration is part of a virtuous cycle that helps economies grow: successful places attract migrants, who help increase the overall level of prosperity of a place, thus attracting more migrants, and so on. It's true in America, it's true in Mumbai, it's true everywhere. Some level of xenophobia is inevitable, but if the rule of law is strong, it remains within managable levels. If.

In the New Yorker, David Denby writes about the future of Hollywood. I share his love of big screens, but am not as worried about their future as he is. People don't go to theatres merely to watch movies, but to be part of an experience. Flat-screen TVs in living rooms and video iPods can never replace that.

Of course, sometimes one wants an entirely private movie-watching experience, especially if it is pondy that one is viewing. For that, there's this.

And have you heard Stephen Colbert yet on the Bollywood feud between Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan? Joy!

In the New York Times, Danielle Trussardi has a moving piece called "War’s Rorschach Test" on how a man and his mother can derive different meanings from the bodycounts of soldiers published during a war.